Understanding the Basics of Koi-Keeping
When we get started, we’d want to go over some fundamentals about these intriguing fish and the care and feeding they need.
Koi is the “most obvious” choice.
While koi may grow to be rather large (24 inches or more in length) and need a large pond, you can have just as much fun with a $10 koi as you can with a $200 koi. (And true, koi may cost upwards of $20,000, but we don’t understand how anybody could have fun with a fish that expensive.
As you continue reading, you will learn exactly what it is that makes particular koi so attractive to acquire and why koi judges are so fascinated with them.
permits you to keep an eye on them for a period of time to ensure that those with contagious illnesses do not make their way into your main pond and contaminate others.
Your other fish, as it were. A transitional tub may also be used as an emergency bathtub.
If a disaster hits your pond, you may use it as a makeshift hospital where you can cure ill and wounded fish.
A temporary residence for your koi
In addition to a permanent home for your koi, you’ll need a second, temporary location to quarantine any additional fish that come into your care. A quarantine tub lets you to gently acclimate your koi to its new home. It also has a similar effect.
Your koi will have a permanent home (most likely a pond)
If you want to maintain koi, you must first build a pond, same like you would while creating Welch Rarebit (“First start with a rabbit”). There are just a few unbreakable laws in pond design and construction, and they are:
Keep the design simple:
a rectangle, a square, or a circle are all suitable options to consider. A filter works well for cleaning up these forms. Instead of koi, goldfish should be the fish of choice for a dumbbell-shaped pond.
Perhaps you will be surprised to discover that the pond is much smaller than you anticipated. The bare minimum is 6 x 9 feet and 4 feet deep, which is more than enough space for a couple of koi to swim about in comfortably.
Little koi, on the other hand, develop into large koi (up to 24 inches in length), and they need plenty of space to swim about in. To be completely honest, we feel obligated to tell you that as time goes on, koi-keepers’ ponds get more large in order to meet their expanding passion.
so you must know which ones need more labor and money and which ones require less. If you believe koi could be the fish for you, we walk you through the different types of ponds and their settings.
Gadgets for your pond:
The filter and pump are two important components of the system.
When the numbers exceed five digits, such as in the case of a 15,000-gallon pond, the status of the pond becomes apparent.. To be sure, maintaining gin-clear (the koi-keepers’ name for clean) water in an enormous pond might cause hyperventilation, but bear in mind that the pond’s filter performs most of the heavy lifting in this situation.
In this case, we combine the two since they are complementary.) Only the harmful material is strained out by the filter; the pump is required to drive the water through the filter.
In order to manage the large amount of waste produced by koi, a multifunction filter (which can handle both mechanical and biological filtration, generally at separate areas of the filter) is required, as are drains in the bottom of the pond to provide water to the filter.
While koi breathe the oxygen that is dissolved in the water, it is necessary to install a supplemental air pump to increase the amount of oxygen in the water. The simplest design is to bubble air through the top portion of the filter drains, which is the most common.
Search for a number on the equipment that specifies the number of gallons per hour it can process when picking the appropriate filter and pump. Every two hours, the filter and pump in your pond must be able to turn the water in your pond over (cycle it).
The filter and pump must be of sufficient size for the size of the pond. In case you’re curious about the power consumption, It’s not necessary for your electricity bill to be a nasty surprise every month.
The more you can keep your electricity bills down, the more money you’ll have to spend on koi in the long run. Isn’t it wonderful to be able to save money?
Acknowledging the Specifications of a Koi Pond
Despite the fact that the filtration system takes care of most of the pond maintenance, you are still responsible for keeping the system and the water quality of the pond in good condition.
These responsibilities include the following:
Backwashing (also known as filter cleaning): There are two parts to this procedure that need minimal time and effort:
• Swiping pond water back through the filter to dislodge all of the crud that has been removed by the filter • Opening a valve to allow the cruddy water to drain from the filter
A number of filters feature physical filter mats (similar to those found in your central air conditioner) that you physically take from the filter, shake and rinse off to dislodge material, and then reinstall.
Checking the chemistry of the pond: Even though you may purchase pricey testing equipment, a basic $35 kit with test strips would suffice.
The different colors on the dipped test strips may tell you a lot about the quality of your pond water as well as whether or not your filter is performing its job properly.
we provide you with targets for the levels of ammonia, nitrite, nitrate, and pH in your water, as well as instructions on what to do if any of these numbers are outside of the safe range.